


These are the stories

by RobertSaysThis



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Bleak, Fermi Paradox, Flash Fic, Gen, Science Fiction, Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:00:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21605698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis
Summary: There were stories that were told on countless planets, that were also told here on our own. And this is the story of what those stories all said, which is told when they stop being true.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	These are the stories

These are the stories that have been told before, their contours always changing, their shapes always the same. On countless worlds people have told them, at times when every possibility seems real.

You will have heard these stories yourself, on your world. Perhaps they began when the first of your kind entered space, or walked upon one of your many moons. When they did, you looked out at the dark of the sky and the hum of light within it, and for the very first time you saw the spaciousness of space. Out there, you saw, there were planets and stars and galaxies all ready to be filled with stories— and these were the stories they all wanted you to tell.

And when you told them the stories went like this— for they always do, and always will for as long as there are people round the stars: in the future (the stories say) there are people much like you, yet far cooler and calmer than you could ever be. They will travel to other worlds in the spirit of discovery, and they will always discover a similar thing. On their voyages, they will meet the people of other worlds, who – bar their alien colouring or unusual customs – will always look and behave very much like the people of your own.

And so people will have mocked these stories, as they have been mocked elsewhere. Sentient creatures of other planets, they’ll have said, would be inconceivably different to the people of our own. A ridge-covered brow or particular love of logic are not enough to distinguish these aliens from ourselves, and the stories we tell will be quite at odds with whatever creatures are really out there. And when they said this there was a way those people would have been right, although on the surface of things they were almost exactly wrong. For it is true that the stories were wrong (as they will always be wrong, wherever they are told), but not because the people of other planets were so dissimilar to yourselves.

In truth, the stories were wrong because the people in them were not similar enough. There were always at every level differences; no story told of a thousand worlds of people exactly like us, living lives full of roadworks and mortgages and sticks of rock. No story detailed those identical civilisations of identical people, bursting into being across all of space and time before quickly being snuffed out again. And because of this, no story could tell of the stories those people told, of alien people who were like and unlike them, who taught them how to live as they spread out among the stars. No story told the truth for a long, long time— until the dreams of the stars had died, and the wide night sky seemed as far away as ever.

This is a story that has been told before. It has been told when the astronauts are dying, when the future has fallen away until it can hardly be seen at all. It is told not at the end of worlds, but when a world’s end is in clear view, when the fact of that ending is never discussed and yet etches itself into every tiny thing. It is the story that is told when the mystery of why no alien being has visited us is no longer a mystery, when in our bones we know that the dust that will fall over us must have fallen on them as well. And so in its way this is the story beneath all the stories we ever told; of what we thought the universe could be, and what it turned out to be in the end. It has and will be told in bars and beds and the bleakest nights, and now is the time for it to be told it to you. This is a story that has been told before. We are not the ones who will tell it again.


End file.
